Windows Phone MessageBox implements scrolling!

Helpful quick and dirty debugging tip: I never noticed this before, but if you send a large amount of text to MessageBox.Show() on Windows Phone, it doesn’t just truncate it. It allows you to scroll through it all. Very cool. Very unlike the desktop message box.

I was tinkering today with the web browser control and manipulating the HTML contents via InvokeScript and needed a way to verify the changes. What I was changing was unfortunately not at the very top of the HTML, but I discovered I could easily dump the contents like this

MessageBox.Show(webBrowser1.SaveToString());

and then just scroll down to the portion I was trying to verify had changed.

Now, I’m not recommending that you dump large text to the message box for a user to scroll through – that would be poor form. But as a quick diagnostic trick it can be handy.